her able hands

Brain full of thinkythoughts. Sitting with the possibilities. Knowing that the near future holds new work for me — work with food and people and growing. As I said to Lisa B-K today: I need to decide which side of the relationship I want to be on…the growing and selling, the buying, cooking and serving?

So frost advisory tonight, which I’m letting myself feel happy about because just maybe global warming isn’t happening quite as fast as it surely seems like it’s happening. I know, I’m fooling myself. But end of April for last frost is better than last year, which was two weeks earlier. Lila helped me to spread bedsheets over the raised beds and the m-shaped lasagna bed full of tender sprouts of chard, kale, collards, spinach, arugula, carrots, radish, and turnips. Hopefully the peas and fava beans can withstand a little frost, because I didn’t cover those.

No photos. Battery dead (but charging) and brain too full to think about it. Thanks for your patience. I know it’s boring around here lately.

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Where the frack did that weekend go? My body is so bone tired I can hardly type right now and am thinking that the cup of coffee I have in front of me isn’t nearly strong enough.

We never had any of that predicted rain over the weekend, just a few sprinkles and then nothing but sunshine and warm breezes. I mostly stayed off of the computer and focused on work outside, balanced with a bit of laundry (hung out to dry), some salad assembly, and a bit of seedling transplanting. I haven’t once picked up my camera, so the promised photos don’t exist. Ah well. Here’s what I did knock down over the past two days:

• Raked out beds around the house and weeded out the overgrown alpine strawberries and heal-all that’s taking over (love my scuffle hoe). Visited the wood mulch pile from last year’s visit with the wood chipper about 50 times with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. The pile is about twenty times bigger than in the photo on that post, minus 50 loads. Oh, my aching body.

• Yoga class. Again, with the ow.

• Mowed and mulched lasagna beds with grass clippings, and started the new lasagna bed along the driveway that I’ll add a layer of topsoil to next month.

• That’s because I got $80 worth of manure dumped last night. One by the driveway for that bed (shared with neighbors) and the other by the gardens next door at the in-laws’ house. I shoveled a lot of that last night, too. Have I mentioned my sore torso? My aching shoulders? My hands that feel like they got stepped on?

• Raked out ivy along side of driveway (not all of it, just about 300′ of the 200′ bed) for more lasagna bed materials.

• Transplanted Bee Balm and Rudbeckia into a little bed I made a year ago with rabbit bedding, right behind the playground set.

• Dug out a bunch of overgrown bedding plants in the front, some of which became compost, and some transplanted to bare spots. This to make room for fruit trees, which I should order this week.

• Planted a dozen fingerling potatoes and thought about doing more, but the manure hadn’t been delivered yet and the beds next door really could use a good run with the rototiller (which I’ll have to borrow). Plus, I promised a friend I’d dry some violets for her, so I need to run over there and dig those up first.

It felt so good to see the property looking cared for after such a long winter, and to feel the earth under my feet, a shovel in my hands. The kids played and I shoveled and raked and dug. I let my thoughts wander but kept bringing them back to my body, to my breath.

I know I did more than that, but that’s all I have time for. Now I need to wake up the kids and get us all out the door. Tyler won’t be riding his bike this morning because it’s raining and cold. It’s meant to drop down to 31º and snow tonight. Hard to believe that when it was in the 80s on Friday, but okay. Spring in the Northeast/Midwest is never predictable.

Monday. Back to it, eh?

Tonight I play catchup on my freelance work.

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Thank you all for your encouraging words and for pointing out bits and pieces that I just might be glossing over. I spent quite a lot of time yesterday talking with several people, including Cheril, and writing down a list of my requirements and of what I’m looking for the next big adventure in my life to entail. When I got home I sat down with my neighbor for a bit and told him this:

We’re interested, but don’t like the space. We also feel that in order to open strong and memorably, we would want to have the menu focus on a few things and do them really well, and then leave room to add in other experimental items over time. We want as much organic as possible and to find a way into that niche. We recognize that it will be very challenging to develop a franchise using locally produced food, but still want to make that at least a tiny corner of the plan, where a monthly special uses a local, seasonal food item.

If he wants to do the sub shop in conjunction with the organic foods, we feel that’s just a marketing nightmare (healthy, whole foods and uh…submarine sandwiches!) and we’re not philosophically down with that. We’re two women in our forties who have worked hard to make other people wealthy over the years. We’re not doing that anymore. We’re ready to dive into work that is meaningful for us, and will be much more willing to put extra time into a project that aligns with our values.

I also said I’d done quite a lot of asking around (thanks Becca!) and using my own restaurant experience and my own fuzzy logic, I knew for a fact that his goal of opening his doors in three weeks (or his revised four) is absolutely unrealistic and way optimistic and is a recipe for disaster. And that his idea to have us hand over a menu and he take care of getting it all set up and just have us start when the store opens is crazy because we are the ones who know the food and would need to set up the line process, figure out the timing on everything and then train the staff to do what we do and to do it even better.

So if that’s his plan, he’ll need to find somebody else to help him with that, but we will joyfully provide him with cupcakes and cookies via our SugarBuzz home catering gig (our business cards arrived yesterday).

So it turns out he had a difficult afternoon with the man who owns the building, trying to iron out a lease that has quite a lot wrong with it. He’s having second thoughts and took in all I had to say and more. He said he loves our ideas but doesn’t know enough about the market and wants to do more research to see what the numbers are for health food restaurants. He also said that several other people have mentioned that it’s a bad location (a strip plaza with zero personality and a lease that states you can’t do anything to the outside of the building to make your store stand out from the others). He said “If I look for a place in downtown on Main St., would you be interested? If I found that space and turned you two loose in it to run with your ideas?”

Uh…yes. Yes, we would be very interested in a project like that.

So he went off to thinkthinkthink, and I went home to stop thinking and worrying about it for the night. And that felt so bloody good. It only took two days to go from white hot excitement to really seeing what is true for me. Phew.

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I’ve got nothing. Camera still sitting in bag with uncharged battery. The three photos I took last week came out too dark because it was so close to dusk and in the back yard. Things are moving fast around here and I’m sitting with a huge life-changing decision for probably one more day and then I have to give an answer. Yes, I’ll stop working here and come to work there, as long as it’s not a drop in pay—but understanding that I’ll likely be working more at least in the beginning. Or no, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing for a little while longer.

See, my neighbor is starting a small restaurant in an old sub shop, a turnkey operation, and he’s looking for someone to help manage it. Two someone’s actually (Cheril and I are in talks and both weighing the load against our lives to see if we can carry it comfortably). It’s daunting because the desired goal for startup is fast (3 weeks!) and we have some requirements for what we are willing to put our energies into: healthy food (at least half vegetarian, fresh, seasonal/local on the menu, organic whenever possible, sustainable waste management and meaningful interaction with the community — beyond mere profit.

Those are all things much easier to do with a restaurant but his idea is to use this space as a testing ground and to build a blueprint that can be franchised. That’s a major challenge implementing even half of our philosophical requirements, but he seems to think we can make it work. We have to make our decision today and if its yes begin immediately working on a simple menu.

I’m at 99% yes even though I have some reservations about certain details. I think this will be an incredible opportunity for me to learn how to and how not to do things in preparation for me starting my own kitchen garden catering business in the future.

My biggest question this morning? Can I deal with likely having even less time to work in my gardens this year? And if that’s my most pressing concern, well, I suppose I’m ready to move on.

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First of all, thank you so much for your thoughtful comments on my last post. Much food for thought, particularly in Joe’s comment. It’s interesting that Joe picked up on the Tyler aspect of the post because that’s the part that I most wanted to write more about, but I stopped doing the mommy blog thing for a reason. I felt like I crossed the line saying anything at all. But now I want to follow up on a few of those thoughts. But that’s for another day after I let it percolate a little bit more. Today I’m thinking more about my blog as a whole.

For a couple of months now, I’ve been annoyed by the fact that most of what I write about, I’ve written about before, and how I’m so very bored with my bloggy self. Then yesterday I read Becca’s post about blogging in time and the challenges for a long-term blogger to make the cyclical nature of things work well.

Time goes forward–2008, 2009, 2010–but it also cycles–spring, summer, winter, fall, spring, 4/16/08, 4/16/09, 4/16/10. That’s the beauty of it. Blogs are essentially temporal: the two things that make a blog a blog are the computer and time as the organizing structure of the post. The topical blogger and the narrative blogger can, I think, take better advantage of this nexus of the progressive and the cyclical. [emphasis mine]

That last line has popped into my head a thousand times as I wonder just how I can take better advantage of that in my own narrative efforts. Each season rolls around again and the idea is to record the progress, both internal and external. What’s happening in the gardens, in the kitchen, with the family, inside of me. What new ideas we’re playing around with in our heads and in our hearts. But I so often now feel as if I’ve already said it all, or that there’s no new way to say it to make it a slightly different story.

I don’t want to stop blogging, but I do think I’ll be posting less story over the next few weeks and working on some photography instead. Things are shifting here and I don’t feel the need to write about any of it. Quite the opposite. I feel the need to hold it inside and keep my attention on the vision of this new life unfolding. To stay in action as much as possible during the transition because I have so very many balls in the air, or pots on the stove, or seeds in the soil. Actually, I’m managing all of these things while working full-time and it’s a little crazy-making. It’s also short-term, I can really feel that. I think looking at it all through the lens may help clarify my vision some, and give me a chance to learn a bit more about this camera I’ve been toting around for three years and still only using the automatic settings.

So let’s end out this gorgeous week (goodness this weather has been spectacular!) with a little list love, and then I have to go make lunches and get us all up and out the door so I can go hang out in the cubicle farm for another eight hours. (I take a break every half hour to close my eyes, breathe deep into my body and see this other life in action—this life of working with food and gardens and people.)

• The squirrels did not, in fact, dig up all of my Fava Beans and Peas. They’re almost all up about an inch now, and I have a newfound hope for the harvest this season.

• My peppers and eggplant are finally beginning to poke through the starter mix after 22 days. I really need to seal off the light stand with some plastic to create more of a heated room in there.

• Three bags of plant splittings that Cheril gave me in the late fall somehow survived the winter, even though they spent it sitting out in plastic grocery bags. They now have new homes in the perennial bed. I have no idea what they are.

• Turnips, radish, arugula, spinach and chard are all up.

• I forgot to take the lids off of my winter sowing containers on Tuesday and fried most of the seedlings. Hand smack to forehead. So much for my masses of Lupine and Delphinium. Boo.

• I have a couple of people who want to buy vegetables from me this year. I’ll make no guarantees on quantity, but will be good practice to get the succession planting schedule in rhythm.

• My brother is considering coming to Kent State to do his graduate studies in ceramics. I know! I might actually have family I understand in town with me in a year. Holy mackerel, Andy. I need to not get too excited about that one because he also might be going to Osaka Japan to apprentice with a master potter. His future is wide open, as Mr. Petty would say.

• Last night my neighbor asked me if I’m pregnant. That’s two people in two months. I really am going to need to learn to chew and spit when testing cupcake recipes. And make time to get vigorous exercise in every day again. And do about five thousand crunches a day, to boot.

• And tell Chris to not bring home any more Corona. No matter how warm it gets out, I need to step away from the icy cold beer.

Happy Friday peeps…here comes another weekend. What’s on your plate?

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